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Rand Paul’s fishin’ for $5M in waste

To cut the budget, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is looking under the sea for solutions.

Paul said Thursday he would give President Barack Obama the power to cut the $5.2 million spent on what he called “goldfish studies” and other wasteful military spending as the country inches closer to March 1, when the $1.2 trillion cuts in federal spending over the next decade take effect.

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“In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish. I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies,” Paul said on Fox News.

The military has funded a study about golden shiner fish, which scientists say are led to swim in schools of fish that could be paralleled for how public opinion is formed, as cited by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in a November report on wasteful spending.

Paul said that he’d be willing to give Obama more authority if he’d cut “nonsense” programs like funding for the goldfish study but said he didn’t trust Obama, who has said the sequester would lead to thousands of government worker furloughs and have widespread negative economic effects.

“I would give him more authority if he’s willing to use it to cut off some of this nonsense, but I don’t really trust a lot of what’s going on when I see him putting local firemen and policemen behind them and saying, ‘Republicans are going to make them lose their job,’” Paul said.

He added: “The sequester was his idea — he signed it into law and he needs to take responsibility and he needs to act responsibly and we’ve given him a list of cuts he could do without laying off anybody.”